The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#11851
Shi Zhengli
#11862
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Shi Zhengli is a Chinese virologist who researches SARS-like coronaviruses of bat origin. Shi directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology . In 2017, Shi and her colleague Cui Jie discovered that the SARS coronavirus likely originated in a population of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan. She came to prominence in the popular press as "Batwoman" during the COVID-19 pandemic for her work with bat coronaviruses. Shi was included in Times 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
Go to Profile#11852
Randall Balmer
#11863
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Randall Herbert Balmer is an American historian of American religion. He taught at Barnard College and Columbia University for twenty-seven years before moving to Dartmouth College in 2012, where he was named the Mandel Family Professor in the Arts & Sciences. He is also an Episcopal priest. He earned his PhD from Princeton University in 1985. He has been a visiting professor at Dartmouth College and at Rutgers, Princeton, Drew University, Emory University, Yale and Northwestern universities and at Union Theological Seminary, where he was also adjunct professor of church history. He has also taught in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Go to Profile#11853
David Cass
#11864
Overall Influence
1937 - 2008 (71 years)
David Cass was a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, mostly known for his contributions to general equilibrium theory. His most famous work was on the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans model of economic growth.
Go to Profile#11854
Steven Heller
#11865
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Steven Heller is an American art director, journalist, critic, author, and editor who specializes in topics related to graphic design. Biography Steven Heller was born July 7, 1950, in New York City to Bernice and Milton Heller. He attended the Walden School, a progressive prep school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, as well as military school. In 1968, he enrolled at New York University with a major in English, later transferring to the School of Visual Arts illustration and cartoon program but not graduating from either. After leaving SVA, he was hired to teach a newspaper design class.
Go to Profile#11855
Robert Post
#11866
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
#11856
Gregory Washington
#11867
Overall Influence
Gregory N. Washington is an American university professor and academic administrator. On July 1, 2020, he became the 8th president of George Mason University. Prior to becoming a university president, he was the Stacey Nicholas Dean of Engineering in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine from 2011 to 2020. He was the first African-American person to be made dean of an engineering school in the University of California system. His research considers dynamical systems, smart materials and devices.
Go to Profile#11857
Munirathna Anandakrishnan
#11868
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Munirathna Anandakrishnan was an Indian civil engineer, educationist, a chairman of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and a vice-chancellor of Anna University. He was also an Advisor to the Government of Tamil Nadu on Information Technology and e-Governance. A winner of the National Order of Scientific Merit , he was honored by the Government of India, in 2002, with Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award.
Go to Profile#11858
Kimball Atwood
#11869
Overall Influence
Kimball C. Atwood IV is an American medical doctor and researcher from Newton, Massachusetts. He is retired as an assistant clinical professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and anesthesiologist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital.
Go to Profile#11859
Lonnie Athens
#11870
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
#11860
Raniero Cantalamessa
#11871
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Raniero Cantalamessa is an Italian Catholic cardinal and priest in the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin and a theologian. He has served as the Preacher to the Papal Household since 1980, under Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.
Go to Profile#11861
John Briggs
#11872
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Briggs is an American author and co-author of general audience nonfiction books in the fields of holistic physics; aesthetics in the arts; creativity, creative process, and consciousness studies. Emeritus Distinguished CSU Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at Western Connecticut State University, Briggs lives in Granville, Massachusetts, where he has served as a Selectman and a police officer.
Go to Profile#11862
Matti Häyry
#11873
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Matti Häyry is Professor of Philosophy at Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland. In 2004-2013, he was Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy of Law at the University of Manchester in England, and before that he held professorships in philosophy and moral philosophy at the universities of Central Lancashire and Kuopio.
Go to Profile#11863
Alan Watson
#11874
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
W. Alan J. Watson was a Scottish legal historian, regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on Roman law, comparative law, legal history, and law and religion. He is credited with coining the term "legal transplants".
Go to Profile#11864
Franklin H. Westervelt
#11875
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Franklin Herbert Westervelt was an American engineer, computer scientist, and educator at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. Westervelt received degrees in Mathematics, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He attained his PhD in 1961. He was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan and an Associate Director at the U-M Computing Center. He was involved in early studies on how to use computers in engineering education.
Go to Profile#11865
Young Thug
#11876
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Jeffery Lamar Williams , known professionally as Young Thug, is an American rapper, singer, and songwriter. Known for his eccentric vocal style and fashion, he is considered an influential figure in modern hip hop and trap music, and a pioneer of the mumble rap microgenre. Williams embarked on a musical career in 2011, releasing a series of mixtapes beginning with I Came from Nothing. In 2013, he signed with fellow Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane's 1017 Records and gained further attention and praise for his debut mixtape with the label, 1017 Thug, released in February of that year.
Go to Profile#11866
Spencer Johnson
#11877
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Patrick Spencer Johnson was an American physician and author. He was known for the ValueTales series of children's books, and for his 1998 self-help book Who Moved My Cheese?, which recurred on the New York Times Bestseller list, on the Publishers Weekly Hardcover nonfiction list. Johnson was the chairman of Spencer Johnson Partners.
Go to Profile#11867
Irwin Fridovich
#11878
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Irwin Fridovich was an American biochemist who, together with his graduate student Joe M. McCord, discovered the enzymatic activity of copper-zinc superoxide dismutase ,—to protect organisms from the toxic effects of superoxide free radicals formed as a byproduct of normal oxygen metabolism. Subsequently, Fridovich's research group also discovered the manganese-containing and the iron-containing SODs from Escherichia coli and the mitochondrial MnSOD , now known to be an essential protein in mammals. He spent the rest of his career studying the biochemical mechanisms of SOD and of biological superoxide toxicity, using bacteria as model systems.
Go to Profile#11868
Michael Craig-Martin
#11879
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sir Michael Craig-Martin is an Irish-born contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He is known for fostering and adopting the Young British Artists, many of whom he taught, and for his conceptual artwork, An Oak Tree. He is an Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths. His memoir and advice for the aspiring artist, On Being An Artist, was published by London-based publisher Art / Books in April 2015.
Go to Profile#11869
Mathilde Krim
#11880
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Mathilde Krim was a medical researcher and the founding chairman of amfAR, American Foundation for AIDS Research. Biography Mathilde Galland was born in Como, Italy to a Swiss Protestant father and Italian Roman Catholic mother. She received her PhD in Biology from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1953. In 1948, she married David Danon, an Israeli man she met at University of Geneva School of Medicine. She converted to Judaism before marriage. They had a daughter and shortly thereafter relocated to Israel.
Go to Profile#11870
Cornelia Funke
#11881
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Cornelia Maria Funke is a German author of children's fiction. Born in Dorsten, North Rhine-Westphalia, she began her career as a social worker before becoming a book illustrator. She began writing novels in the late 1980s and focused primarily on fantasy-oriented stories that depict the lives of children faced with adversity. Funke has since become Germany's "best-selling author for children". Her work has been translated into several languages and, as of 2012, Funke has sold over 20 million copies of her books worldwide.
Go to Profile#11871
Margo Glantz
#11882
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Margo Glantz Shapiro is a Mexican writer, essayist, critic and academic. She has been a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua since 1995. She is a recipient of the FIL Award. Biography Margo Glantz's family immigrated to Mexico from Ukraine in the 1920s. Her father, Jacobo Glantz, met her mother, Elizabeth Shapiro in Odessa, where they married. They tried to emigrate to the United States of America, where they had relatives, but were denied entry and had to remain in Mexico. Although they stayed faithful to Jewish traditions, they soon moved in Mexican artistic circles. Her father was...
Go to Profile#11872
Elaine Hatfield
#11883
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Elaine Hatfield is an American social psychologist. She has been credited, alongside Ellen S. Berscheid, as the pioneer of the scientific study of love. She is employed as a professor in the psychology department of the University of Hawaii.
Go to Profile#11873
Frank Hu
#11884
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Frank B. Hu is a Chinese American nutrition and diabetes researcher. He is Chair of the Department of Nutrition and the Fredrick J. Stare Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#11874
Donald D. Clayton
#11885
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Donald Delbert Clayton is an American astrophysicist whose most visible achievement was the prediction from nucleosynthesis theory that supernovae are intensely radioactive. That earned Clayton the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for “theoretical astrophysics related to the formation of elements in the explosions of stars and to the observable products of these explosions”. Supernovae thereafter became the most important stellar events in astronomy owing to their profoundly radioactive nature. Not only did Clayton discover radioactive nucleosynthesis during explosive silicon b...
Go to Profile#11875
Jan Vansina
#11886
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Jan Vansina was a Belgian historian and anthropologist regarded as an authority on the history of Central Africa, especially of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. He was a major innovator in the historical methodology of oral history. As a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he taught several generations of students and, according to a biographer, "set the pace in African historical studies from the 1950s into the 1990s."
Go to Profile#11876
Wolfgang M. Schmidt
#11887
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Wolfgang M. Schmidt is an Austrian mathematician working in the area of number theory. He studied mathematics at the University of Vienna, where he received his PhD, which was supervised by Edmund Hlawka, in 1955. Wolfgang Schmidt is a Professor Emeritus from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#11877
Lothar Gall
#11888
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Lothar Gall is a German historian known as "one of German liberalism's primary historians". He was professor of history at Goethe University Frankfurt from 1975 until his retirement in 2005. Gall's doctoral thesis examined the political thought of Benjamin Constant, and its influence in Vormärz Germany. His next book was a regional study of liberalism in Baden between 1848 and 1871. This informed an influential 1975 article about the effects of the 1848 revolution upon German liberalism: Gall argued that the revolution transformed liberalism from a constitutional movement committed to a classless society of burghers to an economically bourgeois ideology committed to free-market capitalism.
Go to Profile#11878
A. L. Kennedy
#11889
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Alison Louise Kennedy is a Scots writer, academic and stand-up comedian. She writes novels, short stories and non-fiction, and is known for her dark tone and her blending of realism and fantasy. She contributes columns and reviews to European newspapers.
Go to Profile#11879
David Auburn
#11890
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He also wrote the screenplays for the 2005 film version of Proof, The Lake House , The Girl in the Park , and Georgetown .
Go to Profile#11880
Helmut Reichelt
#11891
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Helmut Reichelt is a German Marxian critic of political economy, sociologist and philosopher. Reichelt is one of the main authors of the “Neue Marx-Lektüre” and considered to be one of the most important theorists in the field of Marx's theory of value.
Go to Profile#11881
Charles Rosen
#11892
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Charles Rosen was a pioneer in artificial intelligence and founder of SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center. He led the project that led to the development of Shakey the Robot, "who" now resides in a glass case at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.
Go to Profile#11882
Mark Gertler
#11893
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mark Lionel Gertler is an American economist, and Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Economics at New York University . A specialist in business cycles and monetary policy, he has been an associate and collaborator of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for more than 30 years. He is among the 20 most cited economists in the world.
Go to Profile#11883
Judy Collins
#11894
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Judith Marjorie Collins is an American singer-songwriter and musician with a career spanning seven decades. An Academy Award-nominated documentary director and a Grammy Award-winning recording artist, she is known for her eclectic tastes in the material she records , for her social activism, and for the clarity of her voice. Her discography consists of 36 studio albums, nine live albums, numerous compilation albums, four holiday albums, and 21 singles.
Go to Profile#11884
Tsuneo Tamagawa
#11895
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Tsuneo Tamagawa was a mathematician. He worked on the arithmetic of classical groups. Tamagawa received his PhD in 1954 at the University of Tokyo under Shōkichi Iyanaga. Tamagawa was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1955/6, 1958, and 1970. He has been on the Yale University faculty since 1963, and became emeritus in 1996.
Go to Profile#11885
Ole Thyssen
#11896
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Ole Thyssen is a Danish philosopher and sociologist, and Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Biography Thyssen is a MA from the University of Copenhagen from 1971, and he became a Doctor of Philosophy from that same university in 1976.
Go to Profile#11886
Édouard Balladur
#11897
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Édouard Balladur is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France under François Mitterrand from 29 March 1993 to 17 May 1995. He unsuccessfully ran for president in the 1995 French presidential election, coming in third place.
Go to Profile#11887
Mehrangiz Kar
#11898
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Mehrangiz Kar , a human rights lawyer from Iran, is an internationally recognized writer, speaker and activist who advocates for the defense of women’s and human rights in Iran and throughout the Islamic world. A common theme in her work is the tension between Iranian law and the core principles of human rights and human dignity. She is also author of the book Crossing the Red Line, and an activist of women's rights in Iran. Born in 1944 at Ahvaz, in southern Iran, she attended the College of Law and Political Science at Teheran University. After graduating, she worked for Sazman-e Ta’min-e Ej...
Go to Profile#11888
Ben Lerner
#11899
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Go to Profile#11889
Nadia Maftouni
#11900
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Nadia Maftouni is an Iranian academic, philosophical author and artist. She is best known as a leading Researcher on Farabian, Avicennian and Suhrawardian philosophy with her modern reading of their works. She is also an established researcher in Jurisprudence and Islamic History. She is an associate professor at University of Tehran, where she is an alumna and a member of the department of Philosophy and Islamic Theology. She is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School and she is on the board of History of Philosophy Quarterly. She is also famous for proposing to Iranian artist Hossein N...
Go to Profile#11890
Abdullah Atalar
#11901
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Abdullah Atalar is a Turkish scientist and academic. Atalar was the Rector of İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, and a professor at Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He received B.S. degree from Middle East Technical University, in 1974, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1976 and 1978, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering. His thesis work was on reflection acoustic microscopy.
Go to Profile#11891
David Tracy
#11902
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
David W. Tracy is an American theologian and Roman Catholic priest. He is Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#11892
Eva Hoffman
#11903
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Eva Hoffman is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer and academic. Early life and education Eva Hoffman was born in Kraków, Poland, shortly after World War II. Her parents, Boris and Maria Wydra, survived the Holocaust by hiding in a forest bunker and then by being hidden by Polish and Ukrainian neighbours. In 1959, at the age of 13, she emigrated with her parents and sister to Vancouver, British Columbia. Upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied English literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the Yale School of Music, and Harvard University.
Go to Profile#11893
Malcolm McLaren
#11904
Overall Influence
1946 - 2010 (64 years)
Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren was an English impresario, visual artist, musician, and fashion designer. He was promoter and manager for punk rock and new wave bands such as New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, Adam and the Ants, and Bow Wow Wow, and as an early commercial architect of the punk subculture.
Go to Profile#11894
Charles Haughey
#11905
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Charles James Haughey was an Irish Fianna Fáil politician who served as Taoiseach on three occasions – 1979 to 1981, March to December 1982 and 1987 to 1992. Haughey led four governments while serving as Taoiseach; December 1979 to June 1981, March to December 1982, March 1987 to June 1989, and June 1989 to February 1992. He was also Minister for the Gaeltacht from 1987 to 1992, Leader of the Opposition from 1981 to 1982 and 1982 to 1987, Leader of Fianna Fáil from 1979 to 1992, Minister for Social Welfare and for Health from 1977 to 1979, Minister for Finance from 1966 to 1970, Minister for ...
Go to Profile#11895
Richard Eberhart
#11906
Overall Influence
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
Richard Ghormley Eberhart was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. "Richard Eberhart emerged out of the 1930s as a modern stylist with romantic sensibilities." He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems, 1930–1965 and the 1977 National Book Award for Poetry for Collected Poems, 1930–1976. He was the grandfather of Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington.
Go to Profile#11896
Marina Lewycka
#11907
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marina Lewycka is a British novelist of Ukrainian origin. Early life Lewycka was born in a refugee camp in Kiel after World War II. Her family subsequently moved to England; she now lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. She attended Gainsborough High School for Girls in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, then Witney Grammar School in Witney, Oxfordshire. She graduated from Keele University in 1968 with a BA in English and Philosophy, and from the University of York with a BPhil in English Literature in 1969. She began, but did not complete, a PhD at King's College London.
Go to Profile#11897
Ron Aharoni
#11908
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ron Aharoni is an Israeli mathematician, working in finite and infinite combinatorics. Aharoni is a professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1979. With Nash-Williams and Shelah he generalized Hall's marriage theorem by obtaining the right transfinite conditions for infinite bipartite graphs. He subsequently proved the appropriate versions of the Kőnig theorem and the Menger theorem for infinite graphs .
Go to Profile#11898
Stephen J. Lippard
#11909
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Stephen James Lippard is the Arthur Amos Noyes Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is considered one of the founders of bioinorganic chemistry, studying the interactions of nonliving substances such as metals with biological systems. He is also considered a founder of metalloneurochemistry, the study of metal ions and their effects in the brain and nervous system. He has done pioneering work in understanding protein structure and synthesis, the enzymatic functions of methane monooxygenase , and the mechanisms of cisplatin anticancer drugs. His w...
Go to Profile#11899
Bill Dally
#11910
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
William James Dally is an American computer scientist and educator. Formerly a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and MIT, he is the chief scientist and senior vice president at Nvidia where he leads the company's research efforts in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .
Go to Profile#11900
Verner Panton
#11911
Overall Influence
1926 - 1998 (72 years)
Verner Panton is considered one of Denmark's most influential 20th-century furniture and interior designers. During his career, he created innovative and futuristic designs in a variety of materials, especially plastics, and in vibrant and exotic colors. His style was very "1960s" but regained popularity at the end of the 20th century. As of 2004, Panton's best-known furniture models are still in production .
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